ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is scornful of Melbourne's "female" traffic lights





'You line up a number of Muslims, who is the good one?'

Pauline Hanson slams Sharia law and women who wear burqas as she warns Australia will be overrun by Islam

Pauline Hanson has revealed she is suspicious of all Muslims and has urged women who wear the burqa to leave the country.

The One Nation leader once again criticised Islam and challenged A Current Affair reporter Tracy Grimshaw to point out a 'good Muslim'.

'I believe there are some (Muslims) that want to live a good life and a quiet life,' Senator Hanson said.

'But you tell me - you line up a number of Muslims, who's the good one?'

The outspoken politician reiterated her well-known view on the burqa in the explosive interview with the Channel Nine program. 

'The burqa should absolutely go. This is Australia,' she said.

'The full face covering I think is wrong. If they want to live that way and have their Sharia law, then I suggest they go to a Muslim country.'

The Senator also revealed she believes Muslim immigration has changed suburban Australia for the worse. 

'I hear Australians that have lived nice quiet lives in the suburbs and then they've had Muslims come in there who have changed their suburbs.

'They've built these mosques and they have their cars parked across the driveway or they have rubbish thrown over their fences... It's having an impact on our educational system, in our schools, in swimming baths.

'If these people want to come and live here - respect our laws. Even in court rooms they have no respect for the judges - won't even stand up.'

The Senator said her party's views are resonating with the Australian public. 'People actually want to see One Nation in power. And that's what I'm picking up all the time,' she said.

'The grumbling from the people - they're actually fed up with both sides of politics, whether it be Liberal, Labor or the Nationals, and they certainly don't want the Greens. 'So they've just had a gutful of the whole lot of them. They feel they're not being listened to.

'Australia is going to slide into a third world country if we do not get our act together. That's my opinion.'

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Teen terror cells in our midst: recruiters target ‘sleeping colonies’

Iraq’s most senior Australian diplomat has warned of “sleeping ­colonies” of potential terrorists in Sydney and Melbourne and ­extremist recruiters targeting ­teenagers.

Hussain Al-Ameri, Iraq’s ­ambassador to Australia, told The Australian members of the Iraqi community had expressed concerns that local Muslim youth were being offered financial incentives by radical preachers. Those included rewards for wearing Islamic clothing, and ­“encouragement” for young ­people to attend their meetings.

Dr Al-Ameri, a former director of the press and human rights ­department at Iraq’s foreign affairs ministry, said Australian mosques associated with the extreme “Wahhabi Salafi ideology” were being watched by authorities.

“They are active here (in Australia) and they believe in this ­Salafi Wahhabi. This is the ideological background of ISIS,” said Dr Al-Ameri, who was concerned about some Iraqis with Australian citizenship working with Islamic State.

“The world is one village through the internet. Accordingly, the contact between countries is very easy so we have a big concern for such persons or for such groups, because they may affect us indirectly.

“For example, when anyone with Australian citizen(ship) — when he’s coming to Iraq we will say ‘welcome’ — we are not ­expecting that he’s a terrorist. “But maybe he’s a member of a ‘sleeping colony’. And maybe he was brainwashed already because the people who practise brainwashing are already present in Australia, and they are active.”

Anne Aly, a leading counter-radicalisation expert and new Labor MP for the federal seat of Cowan, said she had heard of Indonesian recruiters using money to lure youth, but not in Australia.

“I haven’t come across it in Australia. I’ve come across it in ­Indonesia, for recruitment … so if you come and join you’ll get this much money; not so much here. But it is part and parcel of it all, so those who do go and fight as ‘soldiers’ do get a salary,” Dr Aly told The ­Australian.

Sydney Muslim preacher Sheik Wesam Charkawi said: “I work with a lot of youth and it’s not something I have heard of.’’

As the Islamic State grip on ­territory in Iraq and Syria weakens, anti-terror agencies fear small groups or individuals could pose threats in Australia.

In addition to high-profile raids by the AFP, other targeted individuals had their passports suspended to prevent young Australians travelling overseas for terrorist purposes.

National security agencies ­remain at a heightened state of alert, with the terror threat rated ­“probable”.

In the past three years, several accused terrorists have been identified as having Iraqi backgrounds, including teenager Farhad Jabar who murdered NSW police ­accountant Curtis Cheng in 2015.

Student Omar Al-Kutobi was jailed in December for at least 15 years after pleading guilty to one count of acting “in preparation/planning for a terrorist attack”.

Dr Al-Ameri’s comments came a week after ASIO chief Duncan Lewis warned that terror groups were increasingly radicalising younger Australians, whose ages had “dropped by a decade in the space of a couple of years”.

Mr Lewis said that in 2013, 45 per cent of Sunni Islamist extremists investigated by ASIO were aged between 25-34, while in 2015, 40 per cent of were between 15 and 24.

Dr Aly, founding chair of People against Violent Extremism, said: “They are deliberately targeting younger people because it’s not so much about the religion, it’s more about fighting and being a hero and being a soldier; that’s more the appeal.”

Dr Al-Ameri said Iraqi community members had in recent months told him of young people targeted by radical organisations. “Their target is the teenagers because their mind is easily brainwashed. It is a long-term process starting in steps. This is what I heard in Sydney.”

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Reasonable compromise on hate speech law

Malcolm Turnbull is being ­offered a bold reform on race-hate laws that promises to end a ­damaging Coalition impasse over restrictions on free speech, raising the bar for complaints about language that “insults” or “offends” people on the basis of race.

The breakthrough proposal puts “ordinary Australians” at the heart of a tough new test for legal action under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, clearing the ground for talks in federal cabinet about the push to amend the law.

In a new effort to build a consensus for change, the Prime ­Minister has been approached to back the compromise, in order to quash threats to free speech while acting on community calls to ­retain strong sanctions against ­racism.

The plan seeks to insert a “reasonable person” test into the law so that applicants will have to prove the offensive behaviour breaches the standards of ordinary Australians — not just the feelings of a narrow group.

International Development Minister Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, a conservative whose parents migrated to Australia from Italy, has ­canvassed the proposal with her colleagues as a way to bring the law into line with everyday ­community standards.

“It raises the threshold for ­determining what constitutes ­offensive behaviour based on ­racial hatred: to offend, insult, ­humiliate or intimidate,” Senator Fierravanti-Wells writes in The Australian today.

“The test would be what ordinary Australians think those should be. I believe by adding this test we can obviate much of the negativity we are seeing at the moment and deliver the appropriate balance between freedom of speech and freedom from racial vilification.

“The ‘reasonable Australian’ test is a far higher threshold for ­social debate. It has been an ­essential part of the values that we hold dear to have great resilience and racial tolerance. We do not accept racist and xenophobic speech and we also value freedom of expression, religion and belief.”

The plan builds on the findings of a joint parliamentary committee that last week agreed to overhaul the Australian Human Rights Commission to weed out vexatious complaints but failed to reach common ground on ­reforming section 18C itself.

The Australian has been told Mr Turnbull and senior cabinet ministers are preparing to act swiftly on the report in order to force the commission to speed up its decisions, throw out vexatious complaints and prevent the law being used to threaten free speech.

Coalition MPs are struggling to agree on the best path to change the law after growing concern at the drawn-out complaints against three Queensland University of Technology students over their Facebook posts and a more recent case against The Australian’s cartoonist Bill Leak.

Commission president Gillian Triggs is under fire for letting complaints drag on, with critics warning that “the process ­becomes the punishment” as ­defendants must spend thousands of dollars to argue cases at the commission that later go to court.

In the latest dispute, Professor Triggs faces a likely recall by ­Liberal senators to explain ­“misleading” evidence she gave about Leak’s case last week, when she said neither the cartoonist nor the publisher “made any submission” justifying why the complaint should be dismissed under 18D of the law, which provides an exemption for the media and academia.

Leak’s lawyer, Justin Quill, has produced a letter sent to the commission last October that explicitly cited section 18D as grounds for dismissing the complaint over the cartoonist’s portrayal of an Aboriginal police officer handing over a boy to his beer-drinking father who has forgotten his son’s name.

Last week’s report into the racial hatred laws highlighted the divisions within the Coalition by outlining six options for section 18C, ranging from no change to replacing the words “offend” and “insult” and “humiliate” with the word “harass” instead.

The committee also canvassed changing the objective test from a “reasonable member of the relevant group” to a “reasonable member of the Australian community”.

Victorian Liberal senator James Paterson is backing the new offence of “harass” in order to restrict complaints but fellow committee member and NSW Liberal MP Julian Leeser is opposing change to section 18C on the grounds that changes to the commission’s process would be enough to prevent a repeat of the QUT or Leak cases.

One Liberal who opposes change to 18C told The Australian that the “reasonable person” test would still provide fertile ground for Labor and community groups to campaign against the Coalition with the claim they were making it easier for racists to speak out. “But of all the options it is the least bad,” he said.

Another Liberal who wants sweeping change to section 18C said the compromise would not go far enough for those who wanted to dismantle the limits on free speech.

The debate is expected to go to federal cabinet before being put to the full Coalition party room to decide whether to change the law.

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Free speech debate offers Turnbull a free kick at Labor’s expense

Malcolm Turnbull should not shrink from the section 18c fight

The Coalition parties in Canberra are starting to realise that the ­debate over section 18C is not a burden, but a gift.

It is unfolding in a way that will allow the Coalition to wedge Labor and the Greens and portray itself as the only grouping that is prepared to defend the standards of the Australian community.

This has been made possible by the growing push to adopt “the reasonable person” test as the touchstone for liability in section 18C.

Malcolm Turnbull has a perfect free kick all lined up and waiting to be taken. All he needs to do is ­explain that Labor and the Greens — by rejecting any reform of 18C — have also rejected making the standards of the reasonable ­member of the general community the central core of this law.

This is an outrageous insult to the great mass of ordinary Australians, and the Prime Minister should not hesitate to make Labor own it.

Implicit in the do-nothing ­approach of Labor and the Greens is blatant elitism and a deep suspicion about the standards that govern the lives of ordinary, reasonable members of the community.

If Turnbull shrinks from this fight, judges will continue to be prevented from applying community standards when it comes to determining what can and ­cannot be said on the sensitive subject of race.

Australians are not racists. The great mass of society — the reasonable members of the community — are decent people. Their standards should be entrenched in law as a guide for all parts of this ­diverse nation.

Anything less betrays a deep sense of self-loathing that should have no place in a law enacted by the national parliament.

Labor and the Greens are seeking to entrench divisions by giving priority in 18C to standards of ­conduct based on the race, ethnic background or national origin of those who complain.

In the apartheid era, when South Africa enacted laws based on race, colour or national or ethic origin such shameful conduct was called out by Labor for what it was: racism. Labor’s policy now is ludicrous: words, cartoons and newspaper articles that strictly comply with the standards of ordinary members of the community could nevertheless be declared racist.

For Turnbull, a switch to ­community standards as the touchstone for liability should be the first and most important step on the path to reform.

He can take comfort in the fact that those who favour this change include former race discrimination commissioner Irene Moss and former human rights commissioner Sev Ozdowski.

This is not just good politics, it is good law. If the purpose of 18C were to provide guidance for the community on what cannot be said on the subject of race, one consistent standard is the way to achieve clarity.

The elitist posturing of Labor and the Greens has made them vulnerable. The free kick is there. Take it.

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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here